Michael Eisner Interview (page: 2 / 4) Entertainment Executive	Print Interview

How long was it from being an usher to running a company?

Michael Eisner: I was an usher and then I went back to school, and then I came back, wrote a novel -- or tried to write a novel -- gave up on that. Realized I liked being with people, I became a clerk at NBC. I wrote what time the commercials came on the air. I did traffic for NBC Radio, meaning I'd say what freeway was clogged up, made up names of roads, basically names of girlfriends that I was with the night before, the week before. "There was a log jam on the Throgsneck Bridge on Breckenridge Street..." You know, Breckenridge was actually the name of my wife, but I figured out I could have some fun in the entertainment business. Went to CBS, put the commercials in the children's programs, saw every children's program for a couple of years, worked on the Ed Sullivan Show. Wrote about 300 letters trying to get a job anywhere, finally got the job at ABC. And I think when I was about 27, became in charge of daytime television at ABC, having never seen a soap opera in my life, and children's programming. From there I had various different level jobs at ABC. I always went into an area that was in last place, with a philosophy, "You can't fall off the floor." And was lucky, was at the right time and the right place, with the right ideas, and each one of these areas became number one.
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Finally, I guess in my 30s, became in charge of all ABC programming. Got pretty lucky, we did a lot of interesting things at ABC, whether it was Roots, or Rich Man/Poor Man, or Happy Days, or Laverne and Shirley. When I was running children's programming, we did Schoolhouse Rock and After School Specials and a lot of things that were kind of putting more content into what we were doing, not just frivolous, bubblegum kind of stuff.

Gulf and Western and Paramount must have thought I knew what I was doing and they hired me to come as President. And about a year or two after I was there we got lucky with Saturday Night Fever, and Grease, and Heaven Can Wait, and Ordinary People, and Elephant Man, and Terms of Endearment, or whatever.

All along, I was getting more interested in writing, and more and more interested in these cultural phenomena. I didn't even know Saturday Night Fever was a musical. To me it was a story I read in New York magazine called "Tribal Rites of Saturday Night," all about this kid who lived in Brooklyn who was the star in his area. But his area was destined to go nowhere, and he left his friends and he walked across that Verrazano Bridge and went to Manhattan, the Big Apple. I thought that was a great idea for a movie, and didn't really know that the Bee Gees were going to change the world, as far as music was concerned. I've been involved with that a couple of times in my career, where you do something that you believe in and it just creates a cultural phenomenon all over the world. Whether it's dealing with John Travolta, or Happy Days, or now we're doing Home Improvement, we just opened The Lion King. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and so forth. It's just intellectually stimulating and I enjoy it. I enjoy being with people and I don't know how I got here.
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What personal characteristics do you think are important to success, and have been most important to you?

Michael Eisner: Hard work, I think, is important. Being born to parents who care. I don't think necessarily being born to parents of means. Whether it's somebody who walked across Europe out of Poland, or who grew up in the inner city of the United States, or actually was a middle class, or upper class environment. The genetic accident that you want is that you're born from parents who care and support you, and they're there for you, kind of give you the confidence to fail. Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience. And how people around you react when you fail is very important. So, to me, the genetic accident of my birth, I think, is the single most important thing. In my own genes, I have a very strong sense of work; I enjoy working. Maybe that, again, is delivered to me environmentally. I was extremely lucky in that I met somebody right after I got out of college who I married. That became very important. I had somebody who was interested in what I was doing, but didn't believe any of my baloney. Constantly said to me, "Don't believe what people write about you." Kept me level-headed. Delivered for me three sons who became the center of my life. Whenever the heady experience of achievement and reward is presented to you, you have three children and a wife who say, you know, "Dad, can we go to the movies?" or "Dad, we're going to do this." They could care less.
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I think the combination of picking your parents well and then having the same luck with the family that surrounds you gives you a kind of an enclave in which you can succeed. It's very competitive. Sometimes people let the best of themselves come forward, and sometimes people let the worst come forward, at least in American business. The one place I always felt that I could trust, maybe like E.T., was when I got home. They're my staunchest critics and my biggest supporters.

So, I don't know what advice I would give anybody. I believe in the emotional and the psychological side of one's life. I'm psychoanalytically oriented, because I was an English major, I probably shouldn't be. Most people that talk about achievement talk about the non-internal drives. You don't hear much about people suppressing their dark side and letting their light side come out.

I manage a creative company, and I've always managed creative people, since I'm 23 or 24 years old, even in college, writing scripts. You have to have a lot of understanding, and you really have to deal with people who have a lot of things going on in their life that don't relate to what you think they're relating to. When somebody gets mad in the workplace, or somebody yells at you, or blames you for something, maybe they're dealing with their own frustrations, their own sense of failure. And I think understanding that makes you a better manager. Therefore, I put up with a lot. I go for the talent, and put up with a lot of peculiar behavior, none of which I judge, as long as people are basically ethical and moral. I don't know if that answers the questions, but it's a roundabout way for me to say that the ingredients that make for achievement are not necessarily a Harvard education. They're not necessarily winning an award. It may be the sibling who's in the back room who's actually just watching, and studying, and who has an understanding of the drives and the motives.
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I think maybe the best education, or the best foundation for business is probably reading Shakespeare, rather than reading some MBA program out of some great business school. I think I'd rather have an English major than an economics major.
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Somehow, everything that I've been involved in and the people who I feel most strongly about are those that have the most common sense. It's not that difficult. What brings people down I find are the very human things. The lack of common sense, not the lack of understanding some arithmetic table, not the lack of understanding what exactly the information highway is. But the lack of understanding of why somebody is unhappy, or happy, or motivation.
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